pray for a really good time

I was thinking about having fun, as in “We had fun in Gatlinburg” or “Having an empty nest might be fun.” And I was reminded of the prayers my son Stephen gave when he was young. At the end of his prayer he would say something like “and bless us that we’ll all have a good time.” And being a rather outgoing child, he would offer this prayer with a good deal of gusto, sometimes substituting "great" for "good." When he first started praying this way, I didn’t say anything, assuming that he would very soon outgrow the “having fun” prayer. I did do some introspection at that time, wondering where I had gone wrong—apparently I hadn’t done enough praying for the “sick and afflicted” with my children, as we had always said in prayers when I grew up.

But when the prayer for a good time developed into a pattern, I felt I should ever-so-casually mention that perhaps praying for a good time was certainly nice and nothing was exactly wrong with it, still it wasn’t entirely biblical and wasn’t quite like praying that we would be “instruments of Thy peace” or that “we may glorify You,” or that “Thy kingdom come Thy will be done.”

My comments didn’t make much of an impact on his prayers really, and I started thinking, “Well of course, after all, God does indeed want us to have a good time. He created us that we might have joy, and if you’re having joy well then you’re probably having a relatively good time.” However, after having sat through more than my share of joy vs happiness Sunday school lessons, I wasn’t so sure that having joy corresponded all that closely to having a good time. Still it seemed unlikely that God wouldn’t want us to have a good time.

So in the end, I decided that as long as we wanted everyone to have good time, and were willing to work and suffer with those that were having a really bad time in order that one day they too might have a good time, well then that was certainly biblical. It is likely that if we are content to have just a really good time ourselves, we will become shallow, and, in addition, it is likely that we very soon won’t be having a good time—if only because of anxiety—the nearly universal malaise of our time. Unfortunately, when things are not going so well, we often whine about it instead of recognizing that helping others is the key element of having a really good time.